Dwelling of The Muses

A large piece of work made in direct response to an invitation to show my work at the 'Recollect 2009' exhibition in London. Starting with the antique book, the 'Haunted Bookshop' that you can see on the door of the box - I randomly extracted words from the text. 

Firstly I chose what I term as 'artefact words' - interesting words that show themselves to me, next I go back over the text to fill in the gaps and make a new story, which is played out in the box. Each word is logged as I go along, with the page number, line number and word number, thus when it is printed out it is reminiscent of an old ledger book. In this case the new story is written on a scroll. 

One of the phrases in that book was '...the dwelling of the Muses', that is what I based the piece around - the nine Muses of Greek Mythology. Every artefact you can see has a reason for being in there - including the merman in the glass box!